Chasing Shadows
by Cloudeme
Summary: She is the first Big Sister, and will probably be the last. She knows she's different, but she doesn't care. She does her job... and hates.
1. Daddy, Won't You Please Come Home?

She rarely had a moment to herself.

Among the moans of the the steel city fighting off the inevitable ocean, there were often stretches of uneasy quiet that clung close to her like a second skin, bringing chills if she allowed herself to consider them. She did not.

She was afraid of nothing. That was as much a fact as her unyielding loyalty to her father's legacy.

She'd loved her father. Whenever she saw him these days, she was usually too busy to stop and talk, but she believed he understood. He had to.

She understood now, too.

She'd always looked up to him, even before she comprehended what he was protecting her from. He was _her _father, and he loved _her. _He was there as she skipped through ivory halls, seeking angels clad in butterflies and stardust, and that was all that mattered.

But it had not been perfect, she knew. There had always been a... skew to her thoughts. The underlying idea that something was not as it should be. Something was missing.

But, gosh, it simply made no sense.

Her father did more than care for her, he _loved _her. Her sisters played and sang with her every day. She wanted for nothing. She lived in a _palace, _for Mama Tenenbaum's sake.

It became more clear to her as she grew.

It had been strange enough when she was taller than her playmates. Strange, true, but nice. She could reach higher than they, and sneak things from the top shelves. She became stronger than they, and when they played house, it was she who got to be Daddy and carry the littlest of her sisters on her back, just like he did.

Then, things got even stranger. Making her ways through the hidey-holes increased in difficulty. She was flexible enough, but then her shoulders dragged against the sides of the tunnels, and would ache for some time after she had healed.

But she didn't consider any of these things terrible until her father stopped paying attention to her.

She'd heard him calling and had gone through the hidey-hole, just like always. She saw the glow at the end that meant he was waiting for her, just like always. Then she saw nothing.

Dark held no fear for her, even in the rare times her special eyes could not distinguish what lay within. But in that instant, a cold fear choked her throat like a collar, and dragged her to the end of the passage with its great and terrible chain.

She already knew...

...but seeing it was an entirely different thing.

He was there, her father. His hand extended down as he signaled his pleasure with a long bellow, to be met by a slim-fingered pale hand.

The hand of her sister.

Her mind collapsed in the entirety of an instant, like she'd seen a tunnel once do, in one of the panic-filled instances where the beautiful, dream-like world she inhabited was nowhere in sight, and she was trapped in a garish nightmare that made no sense. The pressure had sent her flying, even as her father had moved to cover her, but now she was still.

Pain blossomed from her fingers, and she looked down to see her hands were caught on a loose strip of jagged metal. She tugged free, and watched the blood fall. Her pulse slowed with the faucet-leak drips, eventually ending some undetermined amount of time later with new skin sealing the red river back into her ashen flesh.

Then she looked up... and saw for the first time.

It should have been her destruction; to see such horrors so clearly through eyes used to gossamer petals beneath her feet and glitter surrounding her steps, but as she slid to the floor and felt chilled steel, it seemed so fitting.

It was then she first heard the cold symphony of the ocean.

The sound alone brought her pause, her hand resting against the iron-riveted beam of a door. She waited, giving it time to sing its story to her, and felt comforted. The metallic groans sounded like Daddy.

Like home.

Home, that was certainly a thought. Home. Where now could she live? Her sisters were gatherers - they lived where and how they did by doing their job. She no longer could.

And that knowledge sent her careening; falling into the embrace of the harshly cold glass within the tube-like tunnel. She caught a final glimpse of her father just ahead with one of her sisters, and then gravity brought the floor to say hello.


	2. Daddy's Little Girl

I find it interesting that "Big Sister" is not in the character-category choice. All well.

* * *

This was the part she hated - the counting. She could never stop counting, could never rest her mind, knowing one of her little sisters might have a slight possibility of not being where she was supposed to be. It was bad enough letting them leave the safety of their home when summoned by their father to do their jobs, but for something like this?

She spared a moment to consider the noises around her. Yes, the small breaths of her sister, safely within the ribboned grate.

She knew her sisters did not fear the world they wandered, but why they'd recently taken to sneaking -_deliberate sneaking_- out of her carefully carved-out territory of a safe-zone was beyond her.

She was faster, stronger, and taller, but darn, if they weren't _sneakier_...

She picked up the pace, racing towards the safety of their home with a zig-zag pattern of darting movements that would have dizzied any unfortunate splicer wandering past. And it did, several of them, in fact. Not that she cared, or even noticed.

Back in safety, she released the sister to play with their siblings, and retreated through the ripped curtain that was strung across the broken-in doorway to the small room she shared with herself.

Contrary to the belief Sophia was spreading, she was not omniscient, and needed desperately to rest.

She removed the bracer with the needle-harpoon first, then the other glove, and then her helmet.

Oh, to breathe without the device. How lovely.

Shaking out her short, hideously unattended and low-on-her-priorities dark hair, she glanced to the door, where the divisive curtain was held back by her sister. She was another of the ones called by their younger companions "Big Sister". She was suited similarly to her, and nodded as she continued on her way out. There were only four of them right now, so they took shifts in twos.

She stripped out of the remainder of her suit, tugging on a worn shift that left her gangly, ashen arms bare, and slipped into the waiting bed without preamble.

She didn't know if she would sleep, but she was glad for the rest.

A few moments later, her mind had turned to a rather uncomfortable subject, but not one she could stop herself from thinking of...

Her reluctance to take the job she now drove herself to exhaustion upon, readily.

She'd been found unconscious in one of the innumerable glass-walled tubes that connected Rapture, and taken to a team that, she was informed upon waking, had been devoted to this moment.

It was inevitable that the sisters would grow, she'd been told. Their symbiotic relationship did not halt puberty -which was what they said she'd been going through- despite its other benefits. Unfortunately, the onset of puberty meant that the subject (she glowered at them) was unfit for the duty of gathering, for so many varied reasons.

She'd wanted to scream, to cry, and to tear at them - demand they fix her, make Daddy want her again. Anything to be his again, _anything!_

But she didn't.

Instead, she'd calculated.

She knew the sisters were few these days. First the Man had come and made so many of their number disappear, and then Mama had left them, and then the angels began to... change. They'd always been distant, even in their dreamtime, but it was because of those minute, incomprehensible instances that she'd even begun to understand that what they were was not entirely trustworthy.

She had worried immensely less with Daddy beside her, but _alone? _She couldn't dance that well.

But maybe these... people, could teach her?

They spoke about the weaknesses of the Daddies, her sisters, and other things, in tones and phrases obviously chosen because she was a child.

This made her angry.

"I'm not _stupid. _I don't know why you need it, but what we... what my _sisters _gather is obviously important, and only they can do it. What has this got to do with me?"

They froze, but the blonde lady just _smiled. _

"We need a new kind of protector for the sisters. These people have the idea to train you and those like you (and there will be more) to do this. You would be like a Big Daddy, but... faster. Smarter. You'd be able to protect your sisters, just like they do."

Her words were strange, but the point was plain. Her voice was soft, but her face suggested she was simply trying to make herself appear trustworthy, to at least a degree.

The lady was not. None of them were.

But she couldn't yet take care of herself, so far as she knew.

So she agreed.

Upon the completion of everything; all the genetic tinkering and experimenting and weaponizing and training and mental "conditioning", she appeared exactly as a female version of her father. Exactly what the ice-lady -Sophia Lamb- and her team of scientists wanted, although she had a suspicion Sophia had come up with another use for her, although one of the team -Gil Alexander- coaxed her out of it. She was curious, but could think of no way to investigate.

They decided the best way to test her abilities fully was in the field, so she went. They arranged for a small unit of "splicers" to wander her way, and she _decimated _them. It was easy, and although not for the sake of the non-existent challenge, but for the sake of simply thrilling the expenditure of her new-found abilities, she enjoyed it.

The scientists and Sophia were strict with her battles at first, and, although she had them often, they were usually carefully chosen and staged. "Staged" in that sometimes she was commanded to allow one to escape. Barely.

She hated that; the though of letting them roam freely about _her _city, but found comfort in the fact that now her sisters could safely gather in at least the places she'd cleared and sent them running and staked as her own...

That was the strangest part. She remembered the feelings she could not name at the sight of seeing her sister with _her _father, but she no longer related to them. They belonged to someone else. Someone... foolish.

She loved her sisters, although she rarely got the chance to show it, since she was so busy. When she did see them, though, they'd clamber onto her shoulders and tie ribbons on her armor, calling her their 'Big Sister'.

Big Sister.

She liked that.


	3. My Heart Belongs to Daddy

This one was clever, she noted with a self-derisive growl. He'd issued her a challenge by taking away her little sisters. He'd done so, and then planned a trap for her. She knew he had ensnared the mind of a Big Daddy and stolen Andrew's clever machines, but she also knew why.

Lonely.

She could tell, she could _feel _it. She'd heard her sisters whispering about his return - their father gone so long, Eleanor's father - and had been smart enough to know it was not a good thing. Her sisters would not lie. If they said he was back, he was. She wasn't sure why it was so, but she knew it as truth.

* * *

She recalled Eleanor, the only girl who remained who was her senior. The first among them to be so close to a specific father, and also the last. Alive, anyway.

Poseidon's wrath, how she _hated _Eleanor. The girl in white all _her _sisters looked up to, the one they quietly served. She was using them like such tools, to serve her own gain, but they didn't care. They did whatever she asked, including helping the outsider who had returned so miraculously from the grave to "save" her. The shining knight, rescuing the sleeping princess!

She had to hold back her thoughts for a moment, because her hands had begun to shake.

There was a bit of time, Sophia had told them, before she'd need them. She was taking this encounter very seriously because she'd come to realize that her insipid little daughter's Daddy was a bit more than a cardboard cutout with a slingshot. What a surprise. He'd killed so many of her sisters that only she and her first assistant remained, the eldest of the Big Sisters.

She'd seen the outsider when he first arrived, daring to threaten her little sister. Oh, she should have _ended it there, _but Sophia wanted him _tested. _She wanted him _alive. _All because she wanted to play "house" with her dolls. The stupid-!

It hurt her, and that part of her thoughts immediately took a crashing halt.

She could get away with so many things; hating Eleanor, hating the outsider trash, and even the occasional game of tic tac toe, but she was never allowed to truly hate Sophia. It took so much just to maintain her unyielding disdain.

* * *

The corridors were barren and beaten beyond use, but she knew them. Abandoned soon after the Man had raped Rapture and left her to the cold embrace of the ocean, the glass was cracked and the iron pipes twisted into parodies of sculpture by circumstance and time.

Raided trinkets of a bygone era of prosperity that she wasn't sure she remembered were strung as decoration: records, pearls, scarves, wires, mirrors, frames and so much more were arranged in her own anachronistic symphony. But never bottles. Those she broke, to collect the pieces.

And in the armchair, gazing out the window, was Daddy.

She was fairly certain father's holidays had come and gone, but he'd never told her when they were. All she knew was that he was just so difficult to find good presents for, although she did her best. She'd seen posters with fathers wearing hats, and he'd seemed to like the one she'd brought him, although he was as bashful as ever about it.

She also knew all fathers needed a pipe, which had been difficult to find, but she had done it. It was in a worn tin box lined with ripped velveteen, but it held no cracks, and she was certain that he was the most proud of that possession, even though he promised he was nonmaterialistic. After all, he'd brought her up that way.

It made sense, because she'd rarely owned anything. She'd made dolls when she was little, just like her sisters, but they seemed to... disappear. Blocks and toys belonged to the family, not just her, and father could never afford her presents.

Then again, she'd never wanted for them. She had enough.

But now, she was taking care of the family business for Daddy. She brought home gifts of all kinds to share with her father, and it was only sometimes that she would gaze into the mirror and then wake up in a forest of shattered china and glass. Then she would clean everything up, just like Mama Tennenbaum had when the play got a little rough, and then...

Then she would leak.

It was so strange, to know she'd sprung a leak. In her eye, no less! Unusual, peculiar, they'd call her if she told them, and then they'd study her like they had Mr. Alexander, so she never spoke of it. She just waited, and eventually it would stop on its own. She figured it was less like the leaks she feared in her deepest nightmares, and more like the ones from the sink.

She could deal with that.

This time, though, there was no inconvenient sleeping, or any leaking from the eyes. She had no gift for Daddy, but that was okay. He wasn't greedy. He was the nicest man ever, and she'd never love another like him. He knew that. She made sure.

Anyway, this time she'd come to... well, she wasn't sure.

She'd actually been avoiding going to this place too often. It was a magic place, and she didn't want to overstay her welcome... her sister wouldn't like that.

Where was the pest, anyway?

Oh, yes, in the corner, with her dolls. Her favorite was the one with tawny eyes. It had looked just like her, back when she'd had eyes.

She was so quiet these days, and had been for some time. It was really starting to worry her big sister, who knew that the loss of father's attention could have... well, drastic effects. Luckily for her sister, Daddy still loved her. Just not as much as the daughter who'd followed in his footsteps, of course. But her younger sister was still young. There was still hope.

She said nothing to the shadow in the corner.

The bed, oh how she _hated _it. She hated it _more than Eleanor. _She hated it more than anything else because _nothing else hurt so badly as the empty bed. _

Someone had been there, once, someone special. Someone whose smile could take the hurt away and make it seem like they'd never left the sunny world he had so few precious memories of. He held onto them desperately when she was gone, because that was all he had left of her - memories of a green world kissed by glorious fire and soothed by silver-calm light.

But sometimes the sun had never been there, and it was her son instead. So young, so _young_, and she'd _begged and pleaded but they still took him away_. She'd known they were looking for little girls en masse, but her _son? _What crime had he committed, youth? Innocence? _Hope?_ What was this madhouse under the sea doing, stealing away the only hope she had? She'd show them, ohhhhhh yes. She would. With their own goddamn strength, she'd show them. All she needed was enough ADAM...

_ADAM. _That was a word she knew, that she understood. ADAM, yes... her first. Her first ADAM.

She remembered him. She'd been promised her father would be _wonderful_, and _love her_, and _never leave her unprotected _while she did her sacred duty, but all she could think of were half-familar screamed words and a hazy face that _scowled_. She remembered a syringe and a knife and a lady with coal hair and sad dark eyes that tore into-

No. No she didn't.

Of that, she was promised.

They were nightmares. They were bad dreams. They were silly, and childish, and she was a big girl, wasn't she, out saving the city she'd loved? Mama Tennenbaum had promised, and even though her own name made her shout and break things, Mama Tennenbaum was a very smart lady.

_Mama? Mama? ...Monsters! _

Monsters? Monsters? Why did this child yell at her, why did she so accuse? A monster? I save my family-

_'tlistencouldn'tlisten. WOULDN'T. LISTEN._

There was something, someone, speaking softly. No, singing. Singing. Softly singing, a song just for her. Daddy didn't know this song. It wasn't the broken ones the other sang; NO. She was different. She was... special. She sang a song no one else knew, because they couldn't remember, but _she could. She dared to remember._

And they broke her for it.

That was why she was so different. That was why she was the first Big Sister, and would be the last. She was different than the rest, and it made her _stronger. _She understood emotions of a complex nature to a far further degree than her sisters, little or big. The others were rage-filled automatons, endlessly serving the desires of Sophia because they believed it would save their sisters, or so they believed that they believed.

They truly believed nothing. They served as they did because she _told them to, _and they _obeyed._ But she...

She did it because...

For so many things, actually, that it was a bit difficult to keep track.

But among the reasons was her father.

Among the reasons were her sisters.

And among the reasons was her hatred.

These were the three facets of her main motivation; for love, duty, and honor.

She loved her father beyond all belief; so badly it made her ache with loneliness because he could no longer sing with her in the deep tones of the bellows of Rapture. Somewhere, never seen and long-buried inside her, she knew this was because he was dead. But everywhere else didn't even consider that as possible. She didn't consider it at all.

It had been her job for so long to keep the sisters safe, that their cries of joy and wonder had begun to... mean something. They struck something out-of-place, like the off-key note played in a piano piece, and barely noticed by anyone save the pianist, who obsesses and writhes in agony as they continue on, refusing to let go of the one different note, even though the rest of the work was flawless. It is the flaw they can never move past, not the perfection.

And that was the truth of the third reason.

She, without limit, despised Eleanor for everything she was. The _true _first, last, and only. The princess. The damsel. The beauty.

It didn't take the look she made into the mirror to tell her that she was the opposite of Eleanor in every way; her -'s dark unkempt hair, her father's red eyes, the shadows that clung to her ashen skin, and the unplaceable feeling of disease at realizing she was truly as old as she was. She was no longer _young. _

But Eleanor was, in a tangible way. She slept in her castle and waited for her knight to rescue her, with her clean-feeling appearance and easy smile and natural ability to seduce the sisters with some element of her personality that so closely drew them in.

She wasn't sure how, but she knew it was Eleanor that had brought back Papa Delta. She knew that shed manipulated, used, and abused anything and everything she could to bring her father back, and that just made her _that much more... _

Perfect.

She had everything. She was... she was the comfort... the love... all she had to do was _smile. _Her father loved her. He... he was mindless in his devotion, but in that trait, so much more wise than anyone she'd ever faced. Delta was perfect. Eleanor was perfect.

And she, Eleanor's sister, was nothing.

She was a mere _shadow _on the wall, as Eleanor told her own fairy-tale with captivating puppetry. And it was _her story. _She was the heroine.

Which made her shadow... what, exactly?

Nothing to her father. He would kill her without a second thought, and that was fine. He was all every daughter wanted.

Every... single... one...

It hit her like a tunnel crash.

_Sophia would kill him. _

Loneliness.

_Sophia was unstoppable._

Sisters in loneliness.

_she denied he died, and grinned a broken smile. _

The other sisters were helping HER... They had been all along. For ten years.

_SHE knew he was dead, and did something about it._

It made sense now.

_SHE had succeeded. _

Their little sisters had chosen a side.

_she had succumbed._

And now her path was clear.

_she would save her SISTER from ending as a shadow._

She kissed her father on his helmet.

_SHE was meant to bring their siblings to light. _

And then she pulled on her own.

* * *

Thus ends this three-part miniseries of madness. Hope you enjoyed it.

A few bits of random trivia that didn't quite fit in:

Her "sister" is not a Little Sister, it's a carefully-selected corpse. So much happier, I'm sure.

She did not kill her Big Daddy. She found his body only because she drew a whale with a bowtie and tophat on his back.

She actually does have a name. She just doesn't recall it.

Her favorite color is blue, and she likes salt-and-vinegar chips.

She does not drink alcohol unless its fruity and has an umbrella, and since this is Rapture, that means she never drinks.

Final note: I tried my best to allude in the ending to the fact that she becomes, by her actions, the "perfect altruist" that Sophia wanted so badly.

Duality=irony? I guess.

Anyway, thanks for reading.


End file.
